For Facebook/Star Trek fans: Who was the speaker at the National Press Club lunch this month just broadcast on CSPAN2? Why, George Takei was the speaker.

He is surprised to find himself a celebrity again – at age 70 – a Facebook phenom with millions of followers. As a follower myself, I was interested to learn that when he first turned to Facebook, it was with a mission in mind – to educate younger generations about the WWII Japanese internment in the US. Takei grew up in a camp.

Hey, he thought, maybe use some humor to get a few people to his page. Maybe that would drive some traffic. And maybe he could toss in some advocacy for gay rights? That could help a little. Maybe.

I came upon this last night and have been coming back to it all day. It’s gorgeous and it’s dangerous. I’m interested in how others might be reading it – heck, I’m not even sure yet how I’m reading it . . . these words have not finished with me.

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and the world’s pain and beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

Roger Ebert, who died yesterday, began blogging in earnest some years back after cancer robbed him of speech. He racked up millions of hits and every post generated hundreds of comments. I’ve written about him a few times. From March of 2010:

I discovered his blog a few months ago and was enchanted – a fine writer, a profoundly human man and very very brave. He’s wasting away from cancer – can no longer speak or eat. He doesn’t even have a jaw anymore. And yet he blogs. And he cares. And he has his finger on the pulse of the humanity that is us. I wish I knew him.

Roger Ebert’s Journal was much more than movies; while he chronicled the challenges of his illness he also wrote – always elegantly – of so many other things – of politics, music, art, children and cooking.

He and I were born in the same year, so when he wrote of his own youth, which he often did – as often happens with those battling terminal illnesses – I went back in time with him. Like in this passage from a very recent post titled “How I am a Roman Catholic”:

The nuns at St. Mary’s were Dominicans. They lived in a small square convent behind the school, holding six nuns (some taught two grades) and a cook and their housekeeping nun, who kept a sharp eye trained on us through her screen door. We had humble playground equipment, a swing set and two basketball hoops. Our principal sport was playing King of the World. This involved two boys standing on a log, each trying to push the other off. The housekeeper would open the screen door and shout, “If you break your necks, you have only yourselves to blame.”

It was from these nuns, especially Sister Nathan and Sister Rosanne, that I learned my core moral and political principles. I assumed they were Roman Catholic dogma. Many of them involved a Social Contract between God and man, which represented classical liberalism based on empathy and economic fairness. We heard much of Leo XIII’s encyclical “Rerum Novarum”–“On Capital and Labor.”

I’ll miss him and his writing but I’ll go back now and again to the archives. There is wisdom there.

Anyone who has read down the entire cast list of the movie Lincoln bumped into this mysterious bit of casting trivia: Kevin Kline appeared in the film as a ‘wounded soldier’. The real Kevin Kline. (The headshot in the cast list at Imdb.com is indeed Kline and even his own Imdb page lists the credit. )

I’ve been googling about the interwebs but can find no reference to this odd and utterly delightful bit of information. (I just saw the movie, but didn’t know to look for him; there were, predictably enough, many many ‘wounded soldiers’. And a lot of dead ones. Splendid movie by the way.)

It seems my local movie emporium has discounted tickets on Tuesdays, something of which I was unaware. This is what it looked like when a friend and I got there – and this even though staff had been walking the line telling people that if they hoped to see Lincoln, it was sold out. Turned right around – I don’t do lines. Fandango next time, but this may be the first time this place sold out. Ah, the irresisitable pull of a good movie plus a $5.00 ticket.

My generation mostly doesn’t enjoy Rap or hip-hop and I understand that entirely. Each generation clings to the familiar; each generation finds the following ones lacking; each generation declares the end of history with their own passing.

And so, Rap music and hip-hop have been invisible to those of us who grew up on a different sort of music. Which is too bad, because there’s value there.

The impact has been that the lyrics brought poetry back from obscurity, back into the mainstream, and introduced it to those who might have lived a life without ever reading a line of verse. So much of this is poetry, a vigorous and relevant poetry. Some of it is vulgar or obscene (James Joyce anyone? Henry Miller?), some is vapid (How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?) and will soon be forgotten, but much of it touched on the human condition in a way that resonates with new generations.

One of the biggest of the hip-hop cross-over acts in the 80’s and beyond was certainly The Beastie Boys, who gained respect even amongst black fans. They did plenty of silly party stuff and were never high art. But they expanded a genre, a genre that I think was important. So RIP and fare thee well to founder Adam Yauch. This old lady thinks you done good.

Here’s a video by a rapper Mr. Lif (new to me, but I’ve been cruisin’ around here and found this. I like it, especially the lyrics).

An oldie but very relevant goodie here. (Was he procreating I wonder – and how did that go?) Hat tip to friend Ed – great find!

Limbaugh was detained for more than three hours Monday at the airport after returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic. Customs officials found the Viagra in his luggage but his name was not on the prescription, said Paul Miller, a spokesman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. . . .

In true celebrity fashion, he made a deal with the Sheriff’s office: by tying the matter to his other little legal problem, he gave up nothing and the Sheriff gave up everything. Quite the deal.

Under the deal reached last month with prosecutors, Limbaugh was not to be arrested for any infraction for 18 months in exchange for authorities deferring a charge of “doctor shopping.” Prosecutors had alleged the conservative talk-show host illegally deceived multiple physicians to receive overlapping painkiller prescriptions.

Something like this becomes a story when the person is a celebrity, or when ther person . . . well, just read the rest:

Before his own problems became public, Limbaugh had decried drug use and abuse and mocked President Clinton for saying he had not inhaled when he tried marijuana . . .

“Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. … And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up,” Limbaugh said on his short-lived television show on Oct. 5, 1995. . well, just read the rest.

Haven’t been paying much attention in recent years to popular music. I do notice when something happens (RIP Clarence et al) but don’t generally pay a lot of attention when soemthing new is published.

Here’s what The Guardian has to say about Bruce Springstein’s new album, Wrecking Ball.

Indeed, [the album] is as angry a cry from the belly of a wounded America as has been heard since the dustbowl and Woody Guthrie, a thundering blow of New Jersey pig iron down on the heads of Wall Street and all who have sold his country down the swanny. Springsteen has gone to the great American canon for ammunition, borrowing from folk, civil war anthems, Irish rebel songs and gospel. The result is a howl of pain and disbelief as visceral as anything he has ever produced, that segues into a search for redemption: “Hold tight to your anger/ And don’t fall to your fears … Bring on your wrecking ball.”

Springsteen plunges into darker, richer musical landscapes in a sequence of breath-taking protest songs – Easy Money, Shackled and Drawn, Jack of All Trades, the scarily bellicose Death to My Hometown and This Depression with Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine – before the album turns on Wrecking Ball in search of some spiritual path out of the mess the US is in.

A woman in South Carolina was arrested for public obscenity for having these on her car. It’s still in Court.

On Wall Street it’s different dontchaknow. Behold the industry icon, the brass balls that keep the world spinning and the testosterone flowing in lower Manhattan. This manifestation of the ‘Bull Market Deity’ lives and snorts outside the NY Stock Exchange, where he is also a popular tourist attraction. Whatever you do, do not tell the cops!

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. – A western Pennsylvania school district has decided not to stage a Tony Award-winning musical about a Muslim street poet after members of the community complained about the play on the heels of the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

The Tribune Democrat of Johnstown reports Richland School District had planned to stage “Kismet” in February but Superintendent Thomas Fleming says it was scrapped to avoid controversy.

Fleming tells the newspaper that sensitivity is understandable in part because one of the hijacked planes crashed in nearby Shanksville.

Music director Scott Miller tells The Tribune-Democrat the district last performed “Kismet” in 1983.

Miller says the play has no inappropriate content but he and other members of the performing arts committee decided to switch to “Oklahoma!” after hearing complaints.

But two Florida members of Congress who challenged the “Fair Districts” amendment said they are prepared to appeal the matter all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court . . .

Although the Florida legislature ultimately draws the congressional boundaries under the new law, the plaintiffs argued that the voter-imposed rules dilute the legislature’s authority.

Ungaro’s ruling deals with Amendment 6, approved by 62.9 percent of voters in November, which sets guidelines for congressional redistricting. A companion amendment dealing with state House and Senate redistricting passed with 62.6 percent support and has not been challenged.

The legislature must draw new districts in time for the 2012 elections to reflect 2010 census data. The process in Florida and other states has historically been dominated by partisanship and political considerations. But Amendment 6 states that districts cannot be drawn to favor incumbents or political parties and must be compact and adhere to existing city, county and geographical boundaries “where feasible.”

There were a few stories around last week about the Obama impersonator at an RNC event who was pulled off stage for apparently making racist jokes. I read a few of the jokes and didnt find them at all racist and now I know why the disconnect: the guy was actually pulled offstage when he started to talk about Michelle Bachmann.

In the car yesterday I half heard a story on NPR that mentioned Les Paul, the father of the electric guitar and multi-track recording. Then Bill brought this to my attention this morning.

Google’s logo yesterday was actually an interactive electric guitar – you can still go to Google and try your hand at playing it. Have fun – I did.

Given that, today’s oldie has to be Les Paul and Mary Ford. This is from 1953 and the guy introducing them is Robert Trout, later one of CBS News’ early anchors. Trout was one of “Murrow’s Boys”, the band of WWII radio reporters gathered after the war by Edward R. Murrow to work at CBS.

Ta-Nehisis Coates is a relatively new columnist at The New York Times. I read him today – for the first time – because his column invokedX-Men: First Class, a movie I am about to go see. (I love this stuff.)

Just want to say he’s a gorgeous writer. What a thrill these days to find such as he. I look forward to more.

The city of Grand Rapids, Michigan responded to a Newsweek article calling GR one of America’s “dying cities” with conceivably one of the greatest production numbers ever, performed in one uninterrupted shot by what appears to be the whole city (actually only 5000 humans). For me it eerily segues from Moe’s Gettysburg Address post earlier today–death, rebirth, the triumph of the human spirit–plus it makes me want to go there: